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Notes -
(Stupid) Kids These Days
Article link - no paywall
Rough summary:
(Emphasis above added)
Excellent CW quote:
UCSD isn't an online for profit school. It has traditionally admitted kid from middle to upper middle class families that maybe weren't deeply thinkers, but were assumed to be strongly better than average. Their grads go on to form the professional classes of California suburbs, albeit not the ones with $2m media home price gated communities. Far from a bad life.
And the faculty be saying kids are real, real dumb. Like, really tho.
The rearward looking CW angle is too obvious; DEI, affirmative action, grade inflation in High Schools and a "no child left behind" attitude. I'd sprinkle on some helicopter-parent pressuring as well. For those of you interested in that angle, I await your hopefully hilarious takes.
I'm more interested in the future CW angle. Color me skeptical that these kids, already 18+, are going to really buckle down and crack the books now. If you've been retard-maxxing for nearly two decades, it's hard to slow the Downs and speed up the study. But, as the Dean in Animal House, said, _"Fat, Drunk, and Stupid" is no way to go through life. So what happens to these kids?
10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes. A lot of well intentioned liberals have been smashing the vote button for welfare programs for going on six decades now because they see "structural" problems everywhere - of course the less fortunate need our benevolent support (definitely not noblesse-oblige). But when it just becomes plainly obvious that the COVID generation just has permanent banana brains, does that suicide empathy actually start to dry up?
There's a lot of discourse on the online dissident right about what will finally "wake up" the productive members of society. It usually ends up in HBD adjacent spaces. I wonder if the real "oh shit" moment will be far more obvious - stupid people, of any race, create massive problems and we've been boosting the stupid coefficient for somewhere near 15 years straight now.
One angle that isn't discussed here (because I'm not sure it's relevant yet) is that there will soon be fewer college age kids. As the number of young adults decreases, colleges will either realign to enroll less qualified individuals or they will close. For now, that outcome has been staved off with immigration. But the good times will not last forever.
Is there a large population of people who would go to college but were rejected from every college? People in Community College are basically this demographic, right?
So that number seems to be going down. Is it going down because institutions have lowered their requirements? I don't know. I think this is what we'd see if it was, though.
Bailouts for the education-managerial complex are always highly relevant.
In this case, bailing them out means "the government aids in forcing everyone they can into paying their salaries".
This is the primary driver for credentialism (and more recently, for handing out student visas like candy in countries with semi-private university systems). Legal requirements are a form of [corporate] welfare, it's just that corporation is a union of a large cross-section of society. And yes, it obviously robs the youth of valuable time and money to pay professors and administrators who have no business being there in the first place, just like everything else society does.
I expect other New World countries to nationalize universities as enrollment falls to enshrine the welfare program permanently.
Are there many near-financially-failing public (state/city) schools? I would expect the upper half of the university system to do okay regardless of student applications dropping. The failing schools will be the ones already struggling to put butts in seats, and I'm not sure exactly which those are. A number of small liberal arts schools have already folded. Are there borderline state schools unable to fill classes?
The most high profile example of this that I'm aware of is up in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania State University is not exactly a state school, but it is one of the "big three" schools that are affiliated.
Three years ago they announced a hiring freeze. It's nominally still active at the end of 2025. I know some people who work there who say that their teams have been reduced by more than half simply through attrition.
Earlier this year, they announced that they will be closing seven of their branch campuses. Students who are still attending them will be given financial assistance and priority admission to attend other schools.
The enrollment cliff is real, and it scares the hell out of higher ed administrators.
Sources: Hiring freeze, campus closure
However: This document indicates that each of the seven satellite campuses being closed had fewer than 800 students. The dire situation at those satellite campuses doesn't really reflect the university as a whole, whose main campus enrolls 49,000 students and has not seen its enrollment fall over the past ten years.
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